Anne Lamott Quotes

The world sometimes feels like an insane asylum. You can decide whether you want to be an inmate or pick up your visitor's badge. You can be in the world but not engage in the melodrama of it; you can become a spiritual being having a human experience thoroughly and fully.

That materialistic life, that's not my god.

Spiritual process means approaching your well-being in a scientific manner as a technology for well-being.

Meditation can be like a battle with yourself, your thoughts, your body.

I've always been interested in mindfulness and alternative ways of seeing the world.

I'm really into Deepak Chopra and self-help books.

There is a business side to me and a spiritual side.

There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day.

Focus your mind on what your Highest Self chooses to be.

Every decision I make is a choice between a grievance and a miracle.

I think that we are starting to get much more conscious about, you know, the importance of the spiritual path, and we are fulfilling it by paying attention to ourselves.

It’s perfectly natural for me to sit down and talk about meditating and spiritual practice with my friends. But then I realize, how would it sound to a drunk cynical guy in London?

When you concentrate on the middle of your chest - this is where loving awareness lives. This is the spiritual heart. Not the beating heart, not the emotional heart. This spiri­tual heart goes way back - goes back many incarnations. We call it the soul.

The real meditation is how you live your life.

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

Just be open, life is about a constant journey and I'm very spiritual, but I'm also in touch with what's going on around me and who I am, and you have to know yourself. So for me, that's what keeps me going is just being interactive.

I'm not religious, but I am spiritual and I am creating my own practice.

The purpose of a spiritual discipline is to give us a way to stop the war, not by our force of will, but organically, through understanding an gradual training.

Perhaps the most "spiritual" thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.

Meditation is listening to the divine within

Everyday life surrounds us in a swirling chaos, and it's easy to fall into the grip of our ego's fears and confusion. Remind yourself each day of your intentions and spiritual purpose. Meditate, find your center, look closely at yourself, and don't let go of your intention until it feels centered inside yourself.

A lot of people have realized that a good spiritual practice and a good meditation practice have real benefit. It’s not just something nice to do to make the universe happy.

Meditation is another dimension of natural beauty. People talk about appreciating natural beauty-climbing mountains, seeing giraffes and tigers in Africa, and all sorts of things. But nobody seems to appreciate this kind of natural beauty of ourselves. This is actually far more beautiful than flora and fauna, far more fantastic, far more painful and colorful and delightful.

If you are an enemy to your own mind, other people have to become enemies too, sooner or later. Until you understand, until you can love the thoughts that appear in your mind, then you can love the rest of us. You work with the projector -the mind - not the projected world. I can't really love you until I question the mind that thinks it sees you outside itself . . .

I notice that when I feel the most disconnected, once I'm done blaming the moon and everything else, I can see that I am so mired in identification with form and ego and story and identity, and that if I want to, I can read some scripture or read some spiritual book or pray or meditate or sit in the sun or hang around the birds and the dogs, and get a real objective sense of what's really going on here. That usually softens things.